‘Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 1969. Poverty, violence and despair are still the currency for many African-Americans, but there is a whiff of hope in the air ’, says Andrew Morris...
OUR VERDICT
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 1969. Black America is on the cusp of change. Martin Luther King has been assassinated a year earlier. His Civil Rights Movement is giving way to the more radical Black Power movement. Poverty, violence and despair are still the currency for many African-Americans, but there is a whiff of hope in the air.
Renowned American playwright and Pulitzer prize winner August Wilson crafted powerful drama Two Trains Running around this tumultuous time of social change, through the clarion voices of normal people and their everyday lives.
Memphis Lee’s café is a typical American diner: a coffee pot always on the stove, a jukebox in the corner, stools line the bar counter and a few booths let you see beyond the window to the grimy streets. But close by, everything else is being demolished and a wrecking ball hangs overhead, in a wave of regeneration of failing communities.
Memphis (Andrew French), driven from his home in Jackson, Tennessee and abandoned by his wife, remembers happier days when he sold four crates of chicken a week in the diner and had hundreds of dollars in his pocket. Now, with just a handful of regulars coming to the café, the authorities are imposing the policy of ‘eminent domain’ – compulsory purchase – to acquire the diner. But Memphis insists he will not let the property go for anything less than $25,000.
Young Risa (Anita-Joy Uwajeh) cooks, cleans and serves for Memphis, with little thanks. She is feisty and attractive, other than her badly scarred legs, but seems to distance herself from life and other people.
Wolf (Ray Emmet Brown) runs numbers, a cocksure charlatan dressed in flared check trousers, shiny brown boots and a red leather jacket, with two women waiting for him in Atlanta.
Then there’s Holloway (Leon Herbert), a Morgan Freeman doppelganger, the 65-year-old voice of maturity and reason.
Young Sterling (Michael Salami), fresh from serving five years in the penitentiary, bursts into the diner with a surge of optimism, desperate for a job, keen to march in memory of Martin Luther King and soon tilting his hat in Risa’s direction. But work is hard to come by, he gets ripped off by the numbers gang and we fear he’s heading back to prison. And yet he’s the one to connect with crazy Hambone (Derek Ezenagu), who has repeated the same desperate mantra every day for 9 1/2 years in a vain attempt to get what he earned from white butcher Lutz.
Wealthy undertaker West (Geoff Aymer), dressed top to toe in black, completes the cast of colourful characters. He realised it was more profitable to bury dead bodies than to be one, and opportunistically offers Memphis $15,000 for the restaurant.
Unseen Aunt Ester, ‘320 years old, up the street and behind the red door’, represents the negro past but also an optimistic self-empowered future, encouraging desperate visitors to toss a twenty-dollar bill in the river, have faith in themselves and just ‘go back and pick up the ball.’
Director Nancy Medina delivers a powerful theatrical experience from August Wilson’s words, the superb cast’s performances, Frankie Bradshaw’s brilliant stage design and a haunting jazzy soundtrack. The authenticity extends to the language and interaction, frequent use of the ‘n’ word and black dialect sometimes challenging to absorb.
Two Trains Running is a remarkable, immersive production by the English Touring Theatre and Royal & Derngate Northampton. For close to three hours, you’re transported to Memphis Lee’s diner in 1960s Pittsburgh. You can hear the march for freedom outside, and you feel that all the characters we’ve met might just find their lives improving at last…
Venue: The Yvonne Arnaud, Guildford
Dates: 15-19 October 2019, Mon-Thu 7:45 pm; Fri-Sat 8:00 pm; Thu & Sat 2:30 pm
Ticket prices: from £23.50 (click here for full information on the event)
